Moundville: Second City of the Mississippian World

The great mound city rose on the Black Warrior River about fourteen miles south of what would become Tuscaloosa, at a bend where the floodplain widened into a level terrace. Between one thousand and fourteen fifty AD, a Mississippian chiefdom built twenty-nine earthen platform mounds around a rectangular plaza. At its height the settlement held perhaps a thousand people within its core and drew in people and tribute from a much wider region.

Archaeologists and scholars know it as Moundville, after the modern settlement nearby, and they rank it as the second-largest Mississippian ceremonial center in the United States, after Cahokia in Illinois. The largest mound at the site, Mound B, rises nearly sixty feet above the plaza floor. Ceramic vessels recovered there, painted in distinctive black-on-white patterns and engraved with symbols of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, have turned up in museum collections across the country, some of them dug out by treasure hunters in the nineteen hundreds and never recovered.

In nineteen eighty, a break-in at the site's repository removed two hundred sixty-four pottery vessels. Three ceremonial bowls were anonymously returned in twenty-eighteen. The rest are still gone.

The park opened to the public in nineteen thirty-nine, developed in part by Civilian Conservation Corps workers who stabilized the mounds against erosion. In twenty twenty-one, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Review Committee found the site to be culturally linked to seven Muskogean-speaking tribes who have petitioned for the return of nearly six thousand human remains and funerary objects held by the University of Alabama. The repatriation process was ongoing as of the mid two thousand twenties.

What was built here, what was taken, and what is owed back, remain subjects of active negotiation, one hundred and fifty generations after the platform mounds first rose from the river plain.